Scene Profile – At a Glance
- Location: Leonato’s garden, with a bower of honeysuckle in which Beatrice hides.
- What Happens: Hero and Ursula walk the garden talking loudly of Benedick’s love for Beatrice and of Beatrice’s pride, knowing she is listening in the bower. Beatrice, alone, resolves to requite him.
- Key Characters: Hero, Ursula, Margaret, Beatrice.
- Dramatic Function: The second gulling, matching Benedick’s in Act 2, Scene 3: the women’s half of the prince’s plot, and the scene in which Beatrice is converted. The only scene in the play written entirely in verse.
- Famous Quote:
"What fire is in mine ears? Can this be true?
Stand I condemned for pride and scorn so much?"
(Beatrice, Act 3, Scene 1) - Why It Matters: Hero, silent among men, runs the trick with skill and some relish, and the sharpest woman in the play is caught by the kindest; Beatrice’s ten rhymed lines are the play’s shortest and most complete conversion.
Scene Summary
Hero sends Margaret to the parlour, where Beatrice is talking with the prince and Claudio, to whisper to her that Hero and Ursula are walking in the orchard talking of nothing but her, and to send her to hide in the pleached bower where the honeysuckle keeps out the sun. Margaret promises to make her come. Hero instructs Ursula: when Beatrice comes, their talk must be only of Benedick, Ursula must praise him beyond any man’s deserving, and Hero will say how Benedick is sick in love with Beatrice, for this is how Cupid’s crafty arrow wounds, by hearsay. Beatrice is seen running close to the ground like a lapwing to hear them. Ursula compares her to a fish about to swallow the bait, and they move nearer the bower so that her ear loses nothing.
Hero begins by saying that Beatrice is too disdainful, as coy and wild as hawks of the rock. Ursula asks whether she is sure Benedick loves Beatrice so entirely; Hero says the prince and Claudio told her so, and asked her to tell Beatrice, but she persuaded them instead to let Benedick wrestle with his affection and never let Beatrice know. Ursula asks why, since he deserves as fortunate a bed as any Beatrice could lie on, and Hero agrees that he deserves everything, but Nature never framed a prouder heart than Beatrice’s: disdain and scorn ride sparkling in her eyes, her wit values itself so highly that everything else seems weak, and she cannot love, being so self-endeared. Ursula agrees it would not be good for her to know, lest she make sport of it. Hero goes further: Beatrice spells every man backward, calling the fair-faced her sister, the dark a blot of Nature’s, the tall an ill-headed lance, the short a badly cut agate, the talkative a weathervane and the silent a block, and never gives truth and virtue their due. Nobody dares tell her so, since she would laugh Hero out of herself and press her to death with wit. Better that Benedick consume away in sighs like covered fire than die of mocks, which is as bad as dying of tickling.
Ursula suggests telling Beatrice anyway, and Hero refuses: she will go to Benedick and counsel him to fight his passion, and she will devise some honest slanders to stain her cousin with, since an ill word can poison liking. Ursula begs her not to wrong her cousin so, since Beatrice has too good a judgement to refuse so rare a gentleman; Hero says he is the only man of Italy, excepting her dear Claudio; Ursula praises his shape, bearing, argument and valour, and Hero agrees he has an excellent name. Ursula asks when Hero is married, and Hero says tomorrow, and every day after, and invites her in to choose her wedding clothes. Aside, Ursula says Beatrice is limed, and Hero observes that if so, loving goes by chance: some Cupid kills with arrows, some with traps. They go. Beatrice comes forward alone. What fire is in her ears? Does she stand so condemned for pride and scorn? Farewell contempt and maiden pride; no glory lives behind the back of such. Benedick, love on, and she will requite him, taming her wild heart to his loving hand; if he loves, her kindness will bind their loves in a holy band, for others say he deserves it, and she believes it better than by report.
Cupid’s Crafty Arrow, That Only Wounds by Hearsay
The scene opens as a piece of stage management, and the manager is Hero. She sends the messenger, sets the bower, assigns Ursula her part, and names the method before it begins.
Original
My talk to thee must be how Benedick
Is sick in love with Beatrice. Of this matter
Is little Cupid's crafty arrow made,
That only wounds by hearsay.
(Hero, Act 3, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
I’ll only say to you how Benedick
Is sick in love with Beatrice. That’s how
Cupid creates the arrows that he fires,
That start the rumourmongering.
The Hero who could not speak at her own betrothal is in command here, and the command is precise: Margaret is to say that she overheard, Ursula is to praise beyond merit, Hero will supply the love-sickness, and the bower, where honeysuckle shuts out the sun like favourites grown proud against the prince who raised them, is chosen for its acoustics. The image of the honeysuckle is Hero’s, and it is a courtier’s image, about power turning on its source; the play gives its quietest character its most political simile. Cupid’s arrow made of hearsay is the plot in four words. The theme of deception and noting is handled here by the women as it was handled by the men in the orchard, and the women do it in verse, which the men did not: the whole scene is in pentameter, and the formality is part of the joke, a trap laid in the play’s highest register. Beatrice comes running like a lapwing, and Ursula’s fish with golden oars completes the picture: the hunter is the hunted, and the audience watches the bait go down.
Disdain and Scorn Ride Sparkling in Her Eyes
Hero’s portrait of her cousin is the trap’s bait, and it works because it is true. The scene’s second movement is a character study delivered for the benefit of its subject.
Original
But Nature never framed a woman's heart
Of prouder stuff than that of Beatrice;
Disdain and scorn ride sparkling in her eyes,
Misprising what they look on, and her wit
Values itself so highly that to her
All matter else seems weak: she cannot love,
Nor take no shape nor project of affection,
She is so self-endeared.
(Hero, Act 3, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
But Mother Nature never made a woman
Whose heart was prouder than the heart of Beatrice;
Her eyes are filled with scorn and disrespect,
And undervalue everything she sees,
And she thinks she is so intelligent,
She thinks all others weak. She cannot love,
Nor contemplate affection for another
For she’s so self-enraptured.
Beatrice is proud, scornful, self-endeared, and cannot love; her wit values itself so highly that all else seems weak. Nothing in the description is false, and Hero goes on to prove it with a catalogue: the fair man is her sister, the dark one a blot, the tall one a lance, the short an agate, the talker a weathervane, the silent a block. It is Beatrice’s own method, the spelling of every man backward, turned on her, and it is delivered where she can hear it by the one person she could never answer. The theme of wit and communication is the subject of the speech, and the speech argues that wit of this kind is a disease: it turns every man the wrong side out and never gives truth and virtue their due. Hero’s refusal to tell Beatrice of Benedick’s love, lest she press Hero to death with wit, is the trap’s cleverest piece, since it tells Beatrice that her cleverness is the obstacle, and that the only way to prove the description wrong is to stop deserving it.
Some Honest Slanders
Hero goes further than the plot requires, and the going further is what the scene is about. She will not only keep Benedick’s love from Beatrice; she will slander her cousin to him, kindly, to cure him.
Original
No; rather I will go to Benedick
And counsel him to fight against his passion.
And, truly, I'll devise some honest slanders
To stain my cousin with: one doth not know
How much an ill word may empoison liking.
(Hero, Act 3, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
No; I’d prefer to go to Benedick
And urge him to suppress his passion for her.
And, actually, I’ll make some harmless slanders
Against my cousin; for you never know
How much a bad word can destroy one’s love.
Honest slanders is a phrase the play will not let the audience forget. Hero proposes to stain her cousin with ill words for her own good, and the next scene will show Don John staining Hero with ill words for his own purposes, and the church will show how much an ill word can empoison liking. The symmetry is exact and it is not comfortable: the benign plot and the malicious one use the same tool, and the kindest character in the play picks it up first. Ursula’s protest, do not do your cousin such a wrong, is the scene’s one moment of conscience, and Hero overrides it with the line that is really for the bower, that Benedick is the only man of Italy. The theme of deception and noting shows its double nature here. Hero is lying to make two people happy, and the lie is a slander; the play treats it as a game, and the audience, who know what is coming, hear the word differently.
Taming My Wild Heart to Thy Loving Hand
Beatrice’s soliloquy is ten lines of rhymed verse, the first rhyme she has spoken, and it does in ten lines what Benedick’s took forty of prose to do.
Original
And, Benedick, love on; I will requite thee,
Taming my wild heart to thy loving hand:
If thou dost love, my kindness shall incite thee
To bind our loves up in a holy band;
For others say thou dost deserve, and I
Believe it better than reportingly.
(Beatrice, Act 3, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
And, Benedick, keep loving me; I’ll match you,
And tame myself to make my brash heart sing:
Through kindness, if you love me, then I’ll catch you
And turn your love into a wedding ring;
You’ll make a worthy husband, they suggest,
And I believe it more than they attest.
She hears herself condemned for pride and scorn and does not argue; she says farewell to contempt and maiden pride, and turns to Benedick with an image from falconry, the wild hawk tamed to the hand it chooses to return to. The hawk is Hero’s image too, from the start of the scene, the haggard of the rock, and Beatrice takes it over and makes it a promise. The rhymes are the point. Beatrice has lived in prose and wit for two acts; the formality of the couplets is the sound of her submitting to a shape, and the shape is a sonnet’s ending, the holy band of marriage proposed in verse by a woman who swore she would lead apes in hell. Her last line is the scene’s judgement on itself: others say he deserves it, and she believes it better than reportingly, which is to say better than she would on report alone. The theme of love and romance in this play is love that arrives by hearsay and is then believed better than hearsay, and Beatrice’s conversion is its purest instance.
Language and Technique
- Verse throughout: The scene is the only one in the play written entirely in verse, and the women’s gulling is in pentameter where the men’s was in prose. The formality makes the trap a kind of ceremony, and Beatrice’s couplets at the end answer it.
- Hunting and angling: A lapwing running close to the ground, a fish cutting the silver stream with golden oars, bait laid for an ear, a hawk of the rock, a heart tamed to the hand: the scene’s images are all of catching and taming, and Beatrice takes the last one for herself.
- The catalogue: Fair-faced, black, tall, low, speaking, silent: Hero’s list of the men Beatrice spells backward is wit about wit, a parody of Beatrice’s method that proves the method by using it.
- Honest slanders: The oxymoron names what Hero is doing and what Don John is about to do; the play lets the phrase sit in a kind woman’s mouth a scene before the ill word that empoisons everything.
- Dramatic irony: Everything Hero says is for the bower, and the audience hears it twice, as a description of Beatrice and as a performance for her; Ursula’s she’s limed confirms what the audience has watched happen.
Key Quotes from Act 3, Scene 1
Quote 1
The pleasant'st angling is to see the fish
Cut with her golden oars the silver stream,
And greedily devour the treacherous bait...
(Ursula, Act 3, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
The most rewarding way to catch a fish
Is watching as its fins cut through the water
To gobble up the bait that’s going to snare it...
Quote Analysis: Ursula’s image for the trick: the pleasure of angling is watching the fish cut the stream with golden oars and swallow the bait. The modern verse keeps the fins and the bait. It is the play’s most beautiful description of a deception, and it is spoken by a gentlewoman about her mistress’s cousin; the scene lets the audience enjoy the catch as much as the catchers do.
Why, you speak truth. I never yet saw man,
How wise, how noble, young, how rarely featured,
But she would spell him backward: if fair-faced,
She would swear the gentleman should be her sister...
(Hero, Act 3, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Yes, that’s the truth. I haven’t seen a man yet,
However wise, or noble, young, or gorgeous,
Whose strengths she hasn’t held against him; if pale,
She’d swear the man appeared to be her sister...
Quote Analysis: Hero on Beatrice’s method: no man, however wise, noble, young or handsome, escapes her spelling him backward, and a fair-faced one would be told he should be her sister. The modern verse keeps the catalogue’s start. It is a portrait of Beatrice’s wit from the receiving end, and it is drawn by the cousin who has watched it longest.
Therefore let Benedick, like covered fire,
Consume away in sighs, waste inwardly:
It were a better death than die with mocks,
Which is as bad as die with tickling.
(Hero, Act 3, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
So, Benedick, like fire deprived of air,
Must burn up from the inside through his sighing.
That’s a far better death than death by mockery,
For that’s as bad as being tickled to death.
Quote Analysis: Hero would rather Benedick burn inwardly than die of Beatrice’s mocks, which are as bad as dying of tickling. The modern verse keeps the fire and the tickling. The line is the trap’s cruellest and most effective, because it tells Beatrice that her wit is lethal and that a good man is dying of it in silence.
If it proves so, then loving goes by haps:
Some Cupid kills with arrows, some with traps.
(Hero, Act 3, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
If that is true, then love must be aware
That Cupid kills with arrows or a snare.
Quote Analysis: Hero’s closing couplet, after Ursula says Beatrice is limed: if it works, love is a matter of chance, and Cupid kills with traps as well as arrows. The modern verse keeps the rhyme. It is the quiet bride’s verdict on the whole business of matchmaking, and it is wiser than anything the prince says about his labour of Hercules.
Key Takeaways
- Hero runs the trick: The silent daughter of the betrothal scene manages the gulling with precision and some relish, and gets more lines here than anywhere else in the play.
- The bait is the truth: Beatrice is caught by an accurate portrait of her own pride and wit, delivered by the cousin she could never answer.
- Honest slanders: Hero’s plan to stain her cousin with kind lies uses the same tool Don John is about to use on Hero, and the play places the phrase deliberately.
- Ten lines of rhyme: Beatrice’s conversion is the play’s shortest and most formal; the wild hawk tames herself to a hand she has chosen.
Study Questions and Analysis
How does the gulling of Beatrice differ from the gulling of Benedick?
In length, in register and in method. Benedick’s gulling in Act 2, Scene 3 takes a long prose scene with a song, three gullers, a hidden listener who talks back to the audience, and a forty-line soliloquy of reasoning at the end; Beatrice’s takes a short verse scene with two gullers, a listener who says nothing until the others leave, and a ten-line rhymed soliloquy. The men talk about Beatrice’s love-sickness; the women talk mostly about Beatrice’s pride, and their trick works by making her ashamed rather than flattered. Benedick is told he is loved; Beatrice is told she is incapable of loving, and proves them wrong by deciding to.
Now, Ursula, when Beatrice doth come,
As we do trace this alley up and down,
Our talk must only be of Benedick.
When I do name him, let it be thy part
To praise him more than ever man did merit...
(Hero, Act 3, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Now, Ursula, when Beatrice arrives,
As we are walking up and down this path,
We have to only talk of Benedick.
And when I mention him, make sure that you
Dish praise out more than any man deserves.
August Wilhelm Schlegel (1808) found the drollery of the play in the very symmetry of the deception, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1818) argued that the same stratagem is justified in both cases because the vanity in each is alike; the difference in treatment is Shakespeare’s refinement of the symmetry, since the vanity is attacked from opposite sides. Gail Kern Paster, in the Folger edition, puts it as a contrast of aims: Benedick must be led to believe in Beatrice as different from all other women, while Beatrice must be brought to accept herself as just the same. The theme of love and romance is produced twice by the same means, and the scene’s verse is the sign that the second production is the more serious.
What does this scene reveal about Hero?
That she is capable, clever and not entirely kind. Hero has been nearly silent among the men of the play, consenting to her betrothal with a whisper; here, among women, she organises the trick, chooses the bower, briefs Ursula, invents the honeysuckle simile and the catalogue of Beatrice’s victims, and proposes to slander her cousin for her own good. She enjoys it. The honeysuckle that shuts out the sun like favourites grown proud against their prince is a political image from a governor’s daughter who has been listening at her father’s table, and the portrait of Beatrice is accurate enough to wound.
But who dare tell her so? If I should speak,
She would mock me into air; O, she would laugh me
Out of myself, press me to death with wit.
(Hero, Act 3, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
But who’ll dare tell her that? If I did tell her,
She’d mock me into thin air; she would laugh
My soul from me, and crush me with her wit.
William Hazlitt (1817) called Hero the principal figure in the piece and praised her beauty, tenderness and the hard trial of her love; this scene is the one place the play shows her as something other than tender, and the critics who find her passive have to read past it. Gail Kern Paster calls her too-compliant and notes how she transfers her consent from one wearer of a mask to another; the Hero of the garden is the exception to that compliance, a woman running a scene. Carol Cook (1986) saw the play’s men struggling to control how women are represented, and this is a scene in which a woman controls how another woman is represented, to that woman’s face, and wins. The theme of gender and patriarchy has a quiet counter-example here: the silent bride is articulate when no man is listening.
Why is Beatrice’s soliloquy in rhyme?
Because the form is the conversion. Beatrice has spoken prose for two acts, the prose of wit, in which every sentence can be withdrawn; here she speaks ten rhymed lines in a scene that is the play’s only all-verse scene, and the rhymes commit her. The couplets have the shape of a sonnet’s close, and the content is a vow: contempt and maiden pride farewell, Benedick love on, she will tame her wild heart to his hand and bind their loves in a holy band. A woman who has lived by never saying anything she could not take back says something, in a form that cannot be taken back.
Anna Jameson (1832) observed that Shakespeare contrived that the poetry of Beatrice’s character should not only soften but heighten its comic effect, and the soliloquy is where the poetry arrives: the audience laughs at the speed of the conversion and is moved by the sound of it. William Hazlitt (1817) found something delightfully picturesque in the way Beatrice is described coming to hear the plot against her, and the lapwing running close to the ground is the picture; the couplets are what she sounds like once she has stood up. The theme of wit and communication is set aside for ten lines, and the setting aside is the point: Beatrice without wit, for a moment, is Beatrice in love.
What is the significance of Hero’s “honest slanders”?
It is the play’s most pointed phrase, and the audience hears it a scene before Don John’s dishonest one. Hero proposes to go to Benedick and stain her cousin with some honest slanders, kind lies to cure him of his love, because an ill word may empoison liking. Ursula protests. The phrase is an oxymoron and the play lets it sit, so that when Don John tells the prince and Claudio in the next scene that the lady is disloyal, and when the church shows what an ill word does, the audience remembers that the kindest woman in the play reached for the same tool first.
O, do not do your cousin such a wrong.
She cannot be so much without true judgment –
Having so swift and excellent a wit
As she is prized to have – as to refuse
So rare a gentleman as Signior Benedick.
(Ursula, Act 3, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Oh, do not be so mean to your own cousin.
She can’t be so devoid of decent judgement –
For she has such a sharp and savvy wit
That all think is a strength – as to refuse
A gentleman as rare as Benedick.
Gail Kern Paster argues that in the play’s double plot the actions to make and to break the nuptials employ the same kinds of theatrical means, and the honest slander is the smallest instance: a deliberate ill word, spoken for love, in the mouth of the woman an ill word will nearly kill. August Wilhelm Schlegel (1808) located the play’s comedy in the symmetry of its deceptions, and the symmetry here is between a bride’s game and a bastard’s crime. The theme of deception and noting is not divided by the play into good and bad kinds; it is one practice, and the scene shows its gentlest form in the hands of its future victim.
Does the trick create Beatrice’s love or reveal it?
The play leaves room for both, and the scene tilts towards reveal. What Beatrice overhears is not that Benedick loves her, which she accepts in a line, but that she is too proud to be told, and her response is to prove the charge wrong. Nothing she says in the soliloquy is new information about Benedick; what is new is permission. She believes he loves her, so she can admit that she loves him without losing the war she has been fighting since Act 1, and the speed of the conversion suggests the admission was waiting. Her last line says so: others say he deserves it, and she believes it better than by report.
August Wilhelm Schlegel (1808) read the lovers’ habit of attacking each other exclusively as itself a proof of a growing inclination, so that the trick merely names what was already there; Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1818) saw the stratagem justified by the vanity in each, which is the obstacle the trick removes rather than the love it supplies. Gail Kern Paster takes the opposite line, that the love is the prince’s creation, made to pass the time by accomplishing a difficult thing, and the text allows that too, since Beatrice has given no sign of love before the bower that the audience can be sure of. The theme of love and romance in this play is love that cannot be told apart from the story of it, and the scene is built so that the audience cannot be sure which came first.
